LET THERE BE A RECKONING.

Inside Higher Ed's Steven Mintz has been on a roll of late, acknowledging the malpractice of the English departments, suggesting the propensity of sociology and anthropology to defend their tight priors isn't advisable, and suggesting that activism isn't necessarily the best extension of one's scholarship.

More recently, he's turned his attention to the Hamas pep rallies going on at campuses you might have heard of, which bothered him before those Ivy League diversity hire presidents beclowned themselves on Capitol Hill.

The bad press, the alienated donors, and the deeply disappointed alumni have resulted in an epiphany among many trustees and regents: That all the complaints about coddled and entitled students at elite institutions are true.

As a result, board members, not just at Harvard and Penn, but at other wealthy campuses, are asking tough questions.

There is deep disappointment that their handpicked students, who had been upheld as the best and the brightest and as the nation’s future leaders, seem incredibly myopic, so prone to voicing vile and hateful words. And there is also frustration that the campuses’ senior leaders failed to stand up and excoriate such despicable behavior: students shouting loathsome slogans, ripping down flyers and posters, and, worst of all, defending mass murder and kidnapping even before the bodies had been buried.

Foundations, too, are asking whether the time has come to shift their largesse and their scholarships funding away from the nation’s most privileged students and instead channel their resources toward more deserving students at less privileged institutions.

A hard rain might be about to fall, he argues, although as long as those "less privileged institutions" fail to recognize they are in the same business as the Ivies and continue with their subprime party school or access-assessment-remediation-retention practices, they will continue to be slighted in the U.S. News rankings.

But losing Bill Maher, who has always been sort of a left-libertarian, which too many of the populist right keep failing to grasp, might be a problem for those name institutions.

In a cutting phrase, he likens college life today to “a day spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp to day care center with a meal plan.” He goes on:

“There are few, if any, positives to come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas. Among them, the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed.”

Then he adds this: “Elite schools should no longer be called elite, just too expensive. Which may be why they breed a particular brand of detestable graduate, a personality type that does not emerge from Chico State.”

If you reject the notion that sex is binary, but partition all of humanity into oppressors or oppressed, you just might be ...

That's material for another day.  Perhaps we will see, thirty years after I called for it, a "rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned."

Many readers, in fact, may remember a time when an assignment might be to take on a controversial view and seek to defend it, or seek to get into the mind space of those who embraced it. The goal was not to pick a side per se, but to gain a sense of perspective … to understand depth, not to give up and espouse moral relativity.

I now believe that in the years ahead we will see a reaction to the activist students who pissed off institutional donors, alienated older liberals, riled regents, and have thrown presidents’ careers into jeopardy. That reaction will not take the form of banner headlines. It will occur more quietly.

Unfortunately, what might follow won't not be the University as Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell understood it.  Professor Mintz made a little list.

1.  The downsizing of the humanities will accelerate.
2.  Even more emphasis will be placed on STEM and business and economics.
3.  Development of donor- or legislature-funded programs designed to bring more conservative faculty to campus.
4.  The "soft" social-science programs will become more scientific and grant-focused.

Go to his essay to read his elaborations. He's taking a tragic vision of what might come of the university.

[A] teaching-focused “vocational” university offering a limited number of high demand majors (in business, computer science, design and engineering), relying heavily on SPOCs (small private online courses) and externally developed digital courseware, and combining courses with participation in “real-world” co-op experiences.

Or they might do what I prefer: reaffirm the value of something like traditional college education with a physical campus, a curriculum rooted in the liberal arts, and faculty who are active researchers and scholars as well as teachers. But in my vision, that institution would be more career conscious; it would include more coherent degree pathways that integrate courses from multiple disciplines, more mentoring and more active, problem and project-based learning opportunities. It would also do more to ensure that students master essential skills, knowledge and competencies. The latter would include advanced communication skills, cultural literacy, ethical reasoning, mathematical and statistical fluency, social science theories and methods, and familiarity with the frontiers of science.

Recent days have made clear that the challenges that American higher education faces are not confined to inequalities in access or high costs and excessive student debt or inexcusably low graduation rates, but something that is equally worrisome: That too many students aren’t acquiring the kind of skills that a liberal education is supposed to cultivate.

After thirty-plus years of failing at their mission, is anybody in higher education surprised that people finally noticed?  And note:  I take no joy in seeing the academy change along those four dimensions.  The humanities disciplines might have abdicated their responsibilities, and yet, do you want supposedly objective technocrats with no understanding of the complexity of our interactions?  Apparently, those legislative conservative scholarship faculty are already a thing in Wisconsin.  Would those have seemed necessary had the people in charge of the universities kept their houses in order?  And "scientific" social studies?  Isn't there enough p-hacking already?  Will the pursuit of grants lead to more derivative and faddish thinking than there already is?

But then those precious presidents smirked their way through that hearing, and the fallout is all around us. "When college presidents have lost the confidence of Lawrence Tribe, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and the Biden White House, mistrust runs deep." I repeat: "I don't care who argues that the Credentialed Elite be taken down a notch or two, as long as it is done."

The Larry Tribe reference is Professor Mintz's, as he makes another list, in the aftermath of that hearing.

I read one acid comment that strikes me as plausible: “What we’re seeing is that the qualities that led the presidents to be hired—the willingness to placate the loudest, most insistent voices on campus—are not the qualities that play well outside the ivory tower.”

As the public reaction to the House hearing makes clear, the congressional questions and presidential responses touched a nerve. Public faith in higher education is vaporizing.

In part, those troubles arise because when you deconstruct bourgeois norms and issue harassment codes that placate the loudest voices, you abdicate any claim to scholarly objectivity.

[L]egalities aside, many people are calling for universities to crack down on "hate speech." Instead, critics should demand that universities enforce existing content-neutral rules–and that they certainly should not, as at Cornell, be actively collaborating with student groups in breaking those rules.

That's Volokh Conspiracy contributor David Bernstein, adding to the list of institutions favoring direct action by some constituencies but not others.

Professor Mintz's column continues, noting that the abdication of scholarly objectivity came to the public's attention gradually (I wonder where he stood on the matter of Allan Bloom or Charlie Sykes) and then all at once.

Distrust—whether in relationships or public institutions—proceeds a bit like bankruptcy: it begins slowly then surfaces suddenly. We ignored the termites gnawing away at public trust in higher ed for far too long. Now, the damage had spread beyond the right wing and can be found among many leading liberals.

A series of developments have contributed to mounting public distrust in higher ed, especially at its elite level. Some are obvious. Tuition that rose far faster than inflation for far too long. Scandalous salaries for athletic coaches. Star architecture, luxury-infused dorms, climbing walls and lazy rivers that made well-resourced campuses look like resorts. The Varsity Blues scandal.

His ensuing, nine-item list grants everything some of us had long been calling attention to. Perhaps when one of the house organs for business as usual acknowledges the problem, it will be addressed. "[T]here are good reasons for the diminishing public faith in higher ed."

That there are, but will I be documenting any substantive changes in focus next year?